Canada Day Quiz: Is It Canadian Or American?
Posted June 29, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The Canada Day weekend is here and although Great White Northerners don’t tend to display their patriotism with as much zeal as their American cousins, we’ve done pretty well for ourselves in the 140 years since the country started. Canucks are prominent in the world of sports, movies, even politics. But how much do you really know about what’s Canadian and what isn’t? Here’s a quick quiz designed with just one answer in mind: is this a Canadian innovation or an American one? Click on the item to see the answer.
2) Basketball
5) Light bulb.
6) Scotch Tape.
7) Cash register.
10) The telephone.
1) Canadian, invented by T.E. Ryan of Toronto in 1909
2) Canada’s James Naismith raised a hoop and a holler in 1891
3) Too obvious to be Canadian right? Wrong. It was Canuck John A McLaughlin who drank it in back in 1907.
4) They still run on several T.O. streets, so it seems only fair that Canuck John Joseph Wright put them on the rails back in 1883
5) If you said American and Thomas Edison, you’re not illuminated. Edison perfected the technology but it was said to be invented by a Canadian named Henry Woodward in 1874. History says he sold the patent to the Wizard of Menlo Park.
6) Americans stick to this one. It came from Richard Drew, an engineer with 3M in Minnesota in the 1920s.
7) This one rang up sales first south of the border. An American bar owner named James Ritty thought it up in 1879.
8) Her name was Ruth Wakefield and she came up with the confections in 1930 at the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts. That explains the term ‘tollhouse cookie’ and the American origin.
9) Your trip to the curb has been made easier by the work of Winnipeg’s Harry Wasylyk after the Second World War.
10) Hard to say. Both countries lay claim to this one, because Alexander Graham Bell developed the idea after his family moved from Scotland to Brantford. But he later settled in Boston, where the telephone was finally born.
Find out about more amazing Canadian innovations here.
